He doesn’t answer. He stands, smooths his jacket with both palms, and produces his phone, casually checking the screen.
“How did you get me out, anyway?” The question surfaces while I try to keep standing. “That’s not something you could simply?—”
He smiles.
It is the smile I have always despised most. The one that announces,You have no idea how any of this operates,and takes visible pleasure in the chasm between my comprehension and his. A Machiavellian curl of the lips that has haunted me since the first day he laid hands on me.
“You asked for a distraction,” he says.
The words don’t connect. I stare at him, searching for meaning through the fog still clinging to the edges of my thoughts. “What are you talking about?”
His smile deepens — satisfied, almost delighted — as though my confusion is the precise reaction he was savoring. “It was always so easy to fool you, Ellie. Always. From the very beginning.”
I open my mouth, but nothing emerges. Perhaps it’s the remnants of whatever sedative is still circulating through my system, or maybe it’s because Landon has never made sense to anyone but himself.
But his expression changes. He reads the incomprehension on my face, and rather than explaining further, he reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a second phone.
Not his.
The blood drains from my extremities so rapidly that my vision narrows to a single, terrible point.
The case is rose gold. Two initials embossed in the lowercorner,ML. I gave Maren grief about those initials after she purchased it.Blatant, I called them.Excessive. No one monograms their phone case anymore.And she tilted her chin and saidI doand kept it, because that is who Maren is. Who Maren was. Who Maren?—
“Let me remind you,” Landon says and recites a message back to me verbatim. My own words, extracted from a conversation I believed was private.
“The family I work for. It’s complicated. I don’t think he’ll let me go.”
The room tilts again.
“That was you.” My words are barely a whisper. “The whole time. That was—” My throat seals shut.
“Where is she?” I hear my own voice climb, sharpening into desperation and danger. “What did you do to Maren?”
“I asked for her phone, politely.” He shrugs as if Maren is a minor detail.
The dizziness returns, swift and punishing, but I swallow it whole.
“Where is she?” I take a step toward him. “If you hurt her, I will?—”
The door opens.
The man who steps through it halts me mid-sentence.
I recognize his face. I’ve seen it before.
But where?
The memory comes quicker than expected.
Seated across a dinner table in Rolan’s home on the evening of the formal gathering. The man whose gaze traveled over me with an attention that registered as wrong.
“Miss Calloway.” He pronounces it with the warmth of a host greeting an old acquaintance at a charity gala. “I presume?”
As if there were any doubt. As if he hadn’t orchestrated every detail of my arrival in this room.
I swallow against the dryness in my throat. “Who are you?”
“Besnik Dushku.” He extends a hand. I do not accept it. He withdraws it without a trace of offense, the smile undisturbed. “Your friend here” — a gesture toward Landon that manages to convey both appreciation and contempt in a single motion — “was kind enough to assist me in finally locating you. I have been waiting for this opportunity for quite some time.”
